Thursday, September 9, 2010

My Schedule for the rest of the year

- Starting tomorrow hack 12 hours a day as part of my current project. ( C & Haskell, Machine Learning, if anyone is interested). Will be traveling to places without Internet connectivity. So expect to be mostly offline.

- December - somewhat free. I hope to release some Open Source code before EOY. Fairly old Scala code (so needs to be updated to Scala 2.8, add some comments and so on) but should be useful to others. Paperwork for Open Source release should come through before then.

Jan 1, 2010. New Year. No definite plans but lots of nice opportunities. Problems of plenty. Touch Wood. (Update: "No definite plans" is no longer true. A couple of VERY interesting opportunities in the air. Life is good.)

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Sir , Your Passion is really inspiring for the young generation. And i must say that there must be very rare individuals like you.I am a Software engineer and i am very keen to do systems programming and keep learning and practicing a lot of stuff at home in C, Unix and assembly.But i also have eight years of experience in Java , J2EE and enterpirse technologies.I did my undergraduation in Civil Engineering, so did not knew much about all the beautiful areas which computer science has. Only recently after reading good blogs like yours i realized how much fun i had been missing upon.I have always been working very hard at workplace and work even on weekends to do something extra, but recently i have started having doubts if the amount of effort i am putting in at workplace is really worth.I tried at a lot of big companies which work in systems but at most places even after doing well in interview, they do not offer me to work in their core systems stuff as my background is not in Computer Science.Sir, you do not have a PHd but still the kind of stuff you are doing and the knowledge you have might make even the best of PHds learn a lesson from you.I just wanted to know, is it really necessary to have a computer science degree to get that first good break in a core computer science area ? People are even recommeding me to go for a part time masters program like Bits Pilani offers, but is it really worth ? I belong to an average background and have a family to take care of, so cannot pay the hefty price for a masters program at a US or UK school.Recently i am trying to do some part time project on weekends with some professor at IIT, but just wanted to know if it is really necessary to have a computer science degree to get into a core computer science area.I would really be interested in knowing about how you made a transition to game programming and AI. Did a CS degree help you in that ?With Regards

"... but just wanted to know if it is really necessary to have a computer science degree to get into a core computer science area."

Well this is *my* answer (and I am sure lots of people would disagree). No one can stop you coding or learning anything you want to. Computer Science is not like (say) Nuclear physics where (say) you need a collider to run experiments. If you have a laptop (or even a desktop) running Linux and an internet connection you are equal to anyone else.

" Did a CS degree help you in that ?"

I don't have a CS degree of any kind. So can't answer that ;-)With Regards

thank you so much Sir...like your blog , you are full of positive energy :)I had doubts because some of the big companies clearly told me that they cannot offer me a position in systems unless i have a CS degree, though there was hardly anything they asked me , that i was not able to answer.Thanks again

"some of the big companies clearly told me that they cannot offer me a position in systems unless i have a CS degree, "

*Build* something impressive (vs answering interview questions perfectly or whatever) and you will have no shortage of job offers. Google, Yahoo etc have plenty of people without CS degrees doing very impressive things so I am not too sure this is valid.